to mainstream audiences at a time when few other Amencan producers were will- lng to gamble on them, and also from city politicians and the heads of corpora- tions and foundations from whom Lichtenstein has tirelessly wrangled money in order to keep BAM breathing. The press notices for the gala do not mention that, technically, it should have occurred last year, since Lichtenstein took over BAM in 1967. But in 1992 he was otherwise engaged, furiously doing what he felt he had to do. That was the year when Lichtenstein decided, un- equivocally, that BAM would present "Les Atrides," the French director Ariane Mnouchkine's epic (ten-hour, four-part), expansively multicultural retelling of Aeschylus' "The Oresteia" and Euri- pides' "Iphigenia in Aulis." The produc- tion had already been booked to play in a stadium in Montreal in September, and when Lichtenstein learned that it was crossing the ocean he knew he wanted it In Brooklyn. The timing was not ideal. "It was sometime like Mayor June, after we had really made our final decisions on what we were going to do for programming for the season," Lichtenstein recalled re- cently, seated in the same vast office he took uneasy possession of back in 1967. "So there was no room to go any further In our budget. And here we are, taking on this million-dollar budget. And we figured out, in terms of performance, the most we could gross in ticket sales was around three hundred thousand dollars. It was one of the two or three riskiest things we've ever done, financially. I knew that artistically it made sense." Also, none of BAM's four theatrical spaces could adequately contain the pro- duction; the Academy would have to lease, and transform, the Park Slope Ax- mory, an arena larger than a football field. Lichtenstein took the idea to Karen Brooks Hopkins, the executive vice- president and chief fund -raiser of BAM, who told him he was crazy. She and her staff had just finished putting the money in place to brlng over the National Theatre's production of "Richard III" from London, and they were all ex- hausted. "Doing 'Les Atrides' was in- sane-totally insane," Hopkins says. "I begged him-we fought bitterly. We'd worked on the 'Mahabharata' fund- raising for two years. And here was something coming in with the same kind of need, and we were working on it for about thirty minutes." With extensive help from Annie Cohen-Solal, then the French cultural counsellor in N ew York, who rounded up a weighty consortium of French busi- ness patrons, BAM secured rougWy half a million dollars in advance funding. But there were other problems along the way, some stemming from what Lichtenstein saw as Mnouchkine's insistence on ex- cessive autonomy and control. "She's ab- solutely, totally focussed on just one thing," he says-a strange criticism, coming from him. Nonetheless, "Les Atrides" was tri- umphantly produced, over a ten-day pe- riod, to sold-out houses. But as a result BAM began its next season with a deficit of two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. 'We've been playing catch-up the whole season," said a weary-sounding Hopkins, who observed of her employer, "The thing that is key to understanding Harvey is that his greatest attribute is also his greatest flaw-and that is he will bet the ranch every time on what he be- lieves in." W ITH the exception of the late Jo- seph Papp, the head of the Pub- lic Theatre, no single figure in New York culture in recent years has been as inex- tricably and enduringly identified with an institution as Harvey Lichtenstein has been with BAM. But in 1967, when the thirty-seven-year-old Lichtenstein, with a scant three years of experience in arts administration behind him, took charge of the hundred-and-six-year-old Acad- emy, few people expected him or the in- stitution to last more than a few more years. The Academy had a glorious his- tory as a center for opera, theatre, and classical music. Among the performers who had appeared there were Caruso, Bernhardt, Duse, and Booth, and the musicians ranged from Rubinstein to Heifetz. It had survived a 1903 fire, which levelled the original building. (The formidable N eo- I talianate struc- ture that houses the Academy today was completed in 1908.) By the nineteen- sixties, though, in the light of the bor- ough's economic decline and the mass defection of much of its middle class, the Brooklyn Academy seemed destined to disappear, like such apparently lnde- structible local mainstays as the Brooklyn 43 / fl Y , o 20 . '" .. '-,,-. "".r .. \ '\ \\ t 1 1 1: 1 : . 0 \ . 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